Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Dr Joe Dispenza: Avoid the Lens of the Past

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

Dr Joe Dispenza (bestselling author, researcher, speaker) breaks down practical steps we can take to unlock our potential. He discusses his early days of hypnotizing his roommates, the philosophy of yoga, and the three different types of stress. Dr Joe explains the neuroscience behind why rumination and invoking feelings of the past are harmful to personal growth and how biochemistry can impact pathways. He considers the reason most change is facilitated by crisis or trauma, the benefits of mental rehearsal, and somatic reactions to emotional responses. BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

People wake up in the morning and the first thing they do, you know, their brain is a record of the past. They start thinking about their problems. And those problems are associated with certain people and certain objects, certain conditions in certain times and certain places. So the moment they remember an event they're thinking in the past, the problem is that every one of those memories has an emotion associated with it because they experience it. So then when they feel unhappy, when they feel depressed, when they feel unmotivated, when they feel unmotivated, when they feel, when they feel anxious. Now, their bodies in the past because thoughts are the language of the brain

and feelings are the language of the body. Hi, I'm Myambiolic and welcome to My Breakdown. This is the place where we break things down so you don't have to. It's Myambiolics breakdown. She's going to break it down for you because you know she knows a thing or two. So now she's going to break down.

Very unusual episode for many, many reasons. We're going to talk to Don. Dr. Joe Dispenza, the New York Times bestselling author of an entire movement, you know, of how common people can do the uncommon. And he talks about our endless potential and unlocking that. But first, I'd like to introduce my favorite unknown of endless potential, Jonathan Cohen. Hello, Jonathan. Hello, my. Hello from the mountains of Oregon.

Back in my cave. Jonathan is back in his cave. And we are very grateful that he is joining us via Zoom. different background. I'm kind of liking the dusty rose behind you and there's a floral sofa that really looks delightful. It's a new background, temporary, but unique. Kind of like you. You're temporary and unique. That's right. I feel like I'm saying this a lot lately, but you gotta stick around to the ending of this episode. I mean, this, with all due respect to Joe Dispenza. The ending gets so nuts. Maim has a physical

reaction if you're only listening to the audio. You gotta watch this one. I think we blow her mind. I mean, we break down who she currently is and hold the possibility for her to be someone totally new. And in doing that, she has a physical allergic reaction that I thought maybe she needed an epipen to solve. But let's focus on Joe. All right. Let's talk about Joe. No, I'm going to say that there may be many people who are, you know, curious or even skeptical of the fact that we are having on Dr. Joe Dispenza. There's, you know, a lot of complexity. He does a lot of things that are outside of the realms of our understanding. He, I don't want to say claims, but he has research from his team supporting a lot of really things that are unbelievable, you know,

in the paradigm that we exist in. He is a New York Times bestselling author. He's a researcher, a lecturer. He also does corporate consulting. And he has a practical formula that he uses to help people transform their lives. And, you know, we are not sending people to, you know, this formula. We're not saying that it's the answer to anything, but we are happy to have him to talk about it. He is at the intersection of findings from various fields, neuroscience and genetics and he talks a lot about physics. He believes that teaching people how to heal their bodies by making significant changes and evolving their consciousness can heal people of chronic conditions. He has retreats that he holds all around the world, and his team gathers brain scans, EEGs, and heart rate measurements,

and he uses this data, you know, to talk more about these methods that he teaches. I'm very, very eager to talk to him about how he became Dr. Joe Dispenza and a little bit about what he teaches. And then from that, Jonathan and I, once Dr. Joe leaves, from that, Jonathan and I do a very, very deep dive, you know, into our own perceptions and reactions to this. And it indeed produces a very specific reaction in my body, which Jonathan will break down. So it's a pleasure to welcome, Dr. Joe Dispenza. Break it down. Thank you so much for being here. Hello. Hi there. Where are we finding you? You are in Southern California? Yeah, I'm in Santa Barbara right now. Oh, that's lovely. Are you from there?

Originally, no, but I've spent quite a bit of time here. Got it. Jonathan and I are very, very excited to speak to you. You know, you live at the intersection, you know, of a lot of places that Jonathan and I live, both kind of in our personal experience as rational thinkers and also deep believers in a lot of things that we can't necessarily quantify, you know, or explain. And in our kind of professional world, you know, here as podcast hosts of, you know, a show that we like to think is a deep dive into sort of understanding that intersection sort of between science and experience and belief. You're really kind of a dream guest for us to get to talk to. So thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Happy to contribute. I mean, Jonathan and I talked a bit. We've both done pretty deep dives into so many aspects of you and your career. Maybe you can start by telling us a little bit about like what young Joe was like. Were you always a, were you always, you know, an open-minded, were you raised, you know, I said to Jonathan, like,

maybe we'll find out he was raised by these like super progressive, like holistic people. And like this just was like in the tap water. But we, I'm always curious, you know, especially for people who make such a name for themselves, you know, in a particular niche of wellness, mindfulness, science. I'm curious how you grew up and if it felt like, oh, this is going to be my path or if you have other paths that you explored? No, I had two really, really great parents that my father spent the first 12 years of his life in Italy and then moved to the United States as a first-generation Italian. My mother, also from her parents from Italy, I think the one ingredient that made my childhood so unique was the amount of love that I was always.

supported with and encouraged to experiment with. And I always had interesting ideas. My brother and I were the only two children. And as a kid, I think we all have these really mystical moments, you know, these really profound moments where you sense your connection to something greater, or you have these thoughts about time and space and what does this all mean?

And I think our brains, you know, in that level of curiosity. in the child's brainwaves. They're mostly a lower frequency brainwave, which causes us to kind of dream and imagine and connect. And so my parents really never discouraged us from the exploration of self-discovery, no matter what it was, if it was playing baseball

or was going to art class or if it was doing yoga or eating vegan, you know, they just, and I was a curious kid that really thought, God, there's got to be more to this, and that I'm experiencing. So I just set up the conditions in my life for me to really go in any direction I wanted to go without any judgment as long as I committed 100% to the act. And so that was a, that was a decision and an investment that I, you know, that I had to personally make. So my father would always say, if anybody else could do it, you could do it.

So and, and he went to a very, from a very, you know, standard religious belief over time by the time I got to undergraduate school, I was questioning everything, you know, and I deviated from how I was raised because I was curious about how could this be. And so my parents kind of dove in with me just because they like to learn. And on some level, you know, it allowed me to just explore, you know, potential, human potential. That's really what I was interested in. How could I evolve my experience and how could I get better at whatever I'm doing, you know? And so nothing to really special about my childhood, except I just thought that all parents were like that, and I just thought everybody grew up in an environment like that until I got all enough to realize

that a lot of my friends had a lot of trauma in their past, and that just really just never occurred to me that that could possibly exist. So I had a really healthy childhood with, you know, parents that really loved me and encouraged me. This sounds supernatural, Dr. Joe. You've already entered the realm of the unknown. And for some reason, they just, they got, they got down on the playing field with me. My father, my mother, everybody just got in the playing field and really wanted to try it out with me. So it just got to be, again, just kind of this healthy sense of wonder and curiosity and without judgment. Of course, I stretched them at times, but, you know, they'd come around and really want to know.

And my mother was a pragmatist. You know, she just, you know, she wanted to know how you could apply things. if you learn this information, what are you going to do with it? And with pure reason, decide if it really is instrumental or if it's going to really produce the outcome that you intend. And so I had a very, very heart-centered father who loved life very deeply, and I had a very practical, reasonable, rational mother that somehow knew how to function at a high level.

Again, Dr. Joe, you are entering a realm that we do not understand. So it was just great for me. I just never stopped learning and just trusted, I guess I trusted the process all along the way and it kind of led me in different directions. What were your parents' trades? Were they creative people? Were they scientific people? Both my father and my mother were very, very talented artists.

They could paint, draw. My father was amazing in design. He didn't do that as a vocation. He had his own business and he did other things and was successful in what he did. But my brother is a very, very talented artist. All my children can paint, and one's an architect, one's an artist, one's an engineer. They're very, very spatially oriented and design-wise. So I grew up with a lot of that kind of creative ability to really do something,

create something out of nothing, or at least be around that kind of idealism, that creativity is important and balance it with science and balance it with reason. So my parents were always in that kind of in that creative mode. Your mom also, the pragmatist? Yeah, yeah. She was a great cartoonist. She could really do really cool cartoons. So it was always, we were always dabbling.

My brother went, oh, I went to art school, you know, when I was just a young guy, eight, nine, ten years old. My brother started at five and I was in adult classes, you know, painting, well, painting and stuff. And so, again, my parents just saw something and they just encouraged it. And we just, I just, again, just fun with it. Where were you raised? New York and New Jersey, yeah.

Oh, really? Got it. So do you come from, like, was it a Catholic family? Like Italian Catholic? Italian Catholic, Roman Catholic. Yeah, yeah. And then I had to have a sit down with my dad, you know, when I was 13. And I was like, I just can't tell this. This is way too hard on me.

I want to know more. I mean, that's Bar Mitzvah age. It's like the appropriate thing to do if you're an Italian from New York is at 13. to have an epiphany that is, I am curious because especially, you know, you describe yourself as this very, you know, creative and curious, you know, child. So did you try kind of immersing yourself in traditional religion or did you know instantly like this is not going to work for me? So two things. You know, we moved to a new place, a new city. And I just was unaware of other religious beliefs. I had all these, speaking about bar mitzv, Jewish friends, I had probably gone to

25 bar mitzvahs in one year. I mean, I just, and, and it didn't make sense to me that God was a man. It didn't make sense to me that he had a beard. It didn't make sense to me that if you did something wrong, you did enough of those wrongs that he had a laptop up there where he was actually counting your wrongs and rights. And then at the end of your life, you get to look forward to spend all of eternity in a hot place or, or in a place where you just, just hang out on a cloud and hang out with God. Like that, to me, just didn't make sense in my mind because of, I guess, my trusted my intuition.

And if that God is love, which it's supposed to be, well, that sounds like a pretty insecure, a pretty vindictive, pretty, you know, emotionally imbalanced and deity. And it didn't make sense to me. And I wanted to have that conversation. I read the Old Testament. I read the New Testament. I read all kinds of religious texts. And again, some of the things just didn't make sense to me.

I was just, again, I remember just really having great conversations with my parents about it. And they said that makes sense. You know, we don't know. We don't understand it. So by the time I got a little older, I was like, I just can't do this. Like, I just can't, it just doesn't fit for me. And I tried, you know, I really tried. And so did your family continue going to church and you'd

just didn't go anymore and kind of did your own thing? I think there was probably a four-year period where that transition led to me to that point where you leave for college. And then all of a sudden, you know, I just started studying all religions, Eastern religions, yoga. I was doing yoga by the time I was 17. Then I started with martial arts. And this was a whole different way of me seeing the way the world works.

And it spent a lot of time reading just all these. great, great mystics that just, God, this makes more sense. After reading, spending time in high school, you know, in English classes, and reading about existentialism and all these other crazy things, again, there was more information than just the Bible for me that caused me to really start questions. My Ambialx breakdown is supported by Superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office

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And after you sign up, they'll ask how you heard of. about them, make sure to mention my ambiolics breakdown to help support the show. So you went to Rutgers, correct? Mm-hmm. Which is New Jersey. And you chose to study science, but at the same time, you were kind of increasing your, I mean, I don't know what to call it, your expansive potential. What did kind of your life and practice start looking like, you know, once you left your parents home? Yeah.

Wow, these are all good questions. I mean, I never really talk about this. But when I went to Rutgers, you know, I studied biochemistry and it was in a pre-med program. And it was very competitive. And, you know, I spent a lot of time learning and studying. And biochem just like to let people know, you know, biochemistry is basically the chemistry of all the biological systems in your body. So if you've ever had to learn like the Krebs cycle or, you know, photosynthesis, Imagine that, but covering like tombs and tombs of books of all different kinds of reactions. And it's, it is, I loved biochemistry. There's also biochemistry lab that we had to do. It is the class where I actually learned why, you know, mono-unsaturated versus polysaturated fats are different. Like you literally learn the structure of the things that are in our body that impact pathosurated. ways. I mean, it's the beginning of what I now see, you know, became your path. It's very, very biochemically related. I was just for people who were like, well, that's biochem. That's what

biochemistry is. So go on. Yeah. So with that comes, you know, all kinds of chemistry. Organic chemistry and organic chemistry, you know, and for me, that was just, and physiology and biology was just kind of a passion. I just wanted to understand just kind of how the body worked. And I just remember, I was taking 21 credits. I was crazy as a kid. I was taking 21 credits. And I walked past the billboard. And on the billboard, it said, learn while you sleep.

And then had those, remember how they used to put them on the billboard? And then they'd have the cut, frayed things with telephone numbers, and you rip one off, you know. So I ripped it off. And I was like, learn while you sleep. That sounds really good to me because I'm studying a lot. So it was about hypnosis and self-hypnosis and how you could increase your ability to comprehend and your ability to remember. So I started doing these self-hypnosis classes, you know, in my spare time. And I had three roommates that were just, I had four roommates in total, but I had three of roommates that were subnabulous.

They were deep, deep state hypnotic subjects that I just started. playing with them and seeing if I could put them in an altered state. And much to my surprise, I was amazed at what was possible when you could induce this kind of state. Okay. So can you, for the lay people, tell us what that kind of practically looks like. Like people are going to be like, did he make them quack like a duck? Well, no, but I, what I noticed about them is that they were very lucid dreamers and they would talk to each other while they were asleep. you know and that was kind of interesting for me i was laying there watching them sound asleep and i'd say

dwight uh can you hear me and or or gavin can you hear me and and they would be laughing and talking to each other and i noticed that they could hear me but they were just just in an altered place so so i so i thought god i wonder if these guys are hypnotic subjects and it turned out that they were and so i started studying hypnosis and seeing if not only could i work to a improve my memory and be able to comprehend more because what I really wanted to do was to learn all the material while I was in class. I didn't want to sit there and twiddle my pen or be distracted or I wanted to go in there and I want to learn the content and I want to learn all of it during that lecture and have as much presence and attention as I possibly could and remember everything

that I learned so then I didn't have to study. And then when I came to a test, I would just read the text and I would, you know, be ready to go. So that was my, that was my incentive because I wanted to do other things. I wanted, I just didn't want to spend my whole life cramming. So, so that was, that kind of opened me up to, to the idea of human potential. Just like, wow, then I started seeing what people could do in an altered state, which was very interesting to me, which caused me to start really getting curious about the mind. I started doing yoga at the university and somehow I saw that certain, you know, when I started exposing myself to some of the yogis and masters of the Far East, somehow there was a similar thing that they were doing

and with their ability to control their body or to control their environment, or even control time in some instances, that somehow to me seemed to be related to that hypnotic state. And so that's what kind of opened me up to. And now I just got very into yoga, very into it. Okay. So yeah, I want this is, that's, I mean, also what a, what a fascinating, you know, kind of progression of like the germ of a thought, you know, the implementation of the self-discipline, which you then started demonstrating with other people.

And also, this is kind of like my first, like, Dr. Joe light bulb, right? the more you start tapping into that for yourself, the more you expand the possibilities of your potential in other arenas, right? Would you say that's a safe conclusion? Yeah. And I think that's what information does. I mean, you know, every time you learn something new, I mean, you understand this. You make a new connection in your brain. And learning is making those synaptic connections. Remembering is maintaining and sustaining those connections, right? So knowledge, acts as a raw material for us to become aware of something that we were unaware of. And the moment we become conscious of what we're unconscious of, we see another possibility.

And for me, I didn't want to stay in the philosophical or theoretical realm. I wanted the application. If this guy or this woman, this yogi was able to do that, how am I going to get from here to there? And again, 19-year-old kid, curious, but willing to really explore. and I would do it. I would practice to the best of my ability. And at 19 years old, when everybody else's keg partying and doing shots,

I was kind of interested more than that. Okay, so let's also, I just want to go back to one thing. I couldn't get past organic chemistry. I want to know if you did. Yeah, that was the turning point of my career. I wanted to go to med school. And the only medicine I wanted to practice was psychiatry for the purpose of

better understanding psychological conditions. And this was before psychiatry was seen as the enemy of a lot of people's lives. This was, you know, in the 90s. But I could not get past organic chemistry. And, I mean, so many tears. Like, it was literally the class that made me not go to med school.

And I talk about this a lot, Jonathan's board of hearing the story. But I think it's important because especially when people are like, you're so smart. It's like, when you are in organic chemistry, you cannot beat that curve. If you are not at a certain level of the people that go to med school.

And the standards for med school, I could go on and on about like, really, are those the only people we want? Is those people who can go through O-KM? I think the highest I got in O-KM was like a C-plus, maybe. Anyway, but you also didn't like O-KM. I want to, like, connect with you about this. No, I loved it, actually. I loved it, but I did terrible. I used the class.

In fact, I called the instructor over and I said, you were that guy. I said this reaction is a nickel catalyst and you have the wrong catalyst. Yeah, you have the wrong podcast. This interview is over. No, but again, it was just something that I got really into, you know, because it stretched my mind three-dimensionally. You have to be able to see it three-dimensional. I couldn't see it three-dimensionally, joke. Anyway, that's the level. That's the leveling point for most pre-med students. Yes, I was, I was de-leveled. I also started taking. yoga at college. I went to UCLA. And, you know, I went to UCLA in the early 90s and yoga was not

like a thing. Like, it was like very fringy at that time. Your possession, you could be possessed by doing yoga. I remember. So that's also, I had this unbelievable teacher. I mean, I had never been taught to breathe. Like, I don't think I had breathed for 19 years. Like, when she taught us how to breathe and we did this alternate nostril breathing and like, I'm a person that revs high from like six in the morning till midnight. So to be asked to stop, it was astounding. I mean, it was, you know, it is. It is life changing if you can kind of immerse yourself in that. And you mentioned something that I really want you to kind of explain for us. What is it about time that can shift? What most people could relate to is if you've ever had a dissociative experience, that's not scary. That

can be what a meditative or, you know, yogic experience can be like. And also the yoga that I think Dr. Joe and I are talking about, this is like pre-power yoga. It's pre-hot yoga. You know, this is yoga seen as the... This is the Iyngar, Hatha yoga. Exactly. This is that like there are, I think, seven full branches and like, you know, the poses are just one of them. So you're not just learning poses and how to get buff and how to get that little cut in your shoulder, which we get very proud of. This is about understanding the philosophy of an Eastern tradition with thousands of years of wisdom. But tell us specifically about the time thing, because I know it's important for your later work as well. Well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you it in two ways. First way is just my experience

at that time in my life. And then I'll explain it in terms of what I now know from studying enough quantitative EEGs. Einstein said time and space are not conditions in which we live, but modes in which we think. So there's a relativity to time based on where our attention is, right? So when you're truly in the present moment, for some reason, you lose your sense of time. You're not thinking about the predictable future or you're not trying to, you know, the brain's an anticipation machine. And you're not remembering the familiar past. Can you say that again? Because I love those expressions. You're not thinking about a predictable future. Not trying to predict the future because the brain always loves to fill in reality based on known. What are we going

to do next? What's going to happen next? Right? That's how we function in the 3D world, right? Or we're remembering the familiar past and usually we remember the familiar past really based on the emotions that we have that are really chemical residue from past experiences, right? So people wake up in the morning and the first thing they do, you know, their brain is a record of the past. They start thinking about their problems. And those problems are associated with certain people and certain objects, certain conditions in certain times,

in certain places. So the moment they remember an event, they're thinking in the past. The problem is that every one of those memories has an emotion associated with it because they experience it. So then when they feel unhappy, when they feel depressed, when they feel unmotivated, when they feel anxious.

Now, their bodies in the past because thoughts are the language of the brain and feelings are the language of the body. Thoughts are the language of the brain. And feelings are the language of the body. And how we think and how we feel creates our state of being. So then the memory and the emotion,

the thought and the feeling, and the stimulus and response starts the conditioning process for literally the body to be conditioned emotionally into the past. Now, the body's so objective that it really doesn't know the difference between the real-life experience that's creating that emotion and the emotion that the person is memorized by thought alone.

That's really profound. This is the timeless element of our experience and existence as humans. And I know that, like, this is your specialty, and so it comes very fluid. But I don't mean to stop you to be rude, but I really want to, like, I want to emphasize what you just said. You said the brain does not know the difference, right? the brain or the body. Right. Does not know the difference between that happened and that is still happening because the chemical milieu

is identical. And for some people, I'm not going to say all people, but for some people, that line is very hard to distinguish. And for people like me, for whom that line can almost disappear, we tend to be people who slip very easily between, let's say, pain, memory, emotion, you know, that can wash over. You know, it's almost like the barrier doesn't exist more for some people than for others. Because I know some people who don't seem to function the way that I do. And I wonder what that's like. But sorry, go ahead.

No, but really, it really doesn't matter. I mean, what it really comes down to is how do we get branded, emotionally, you know, and we all have events in our life that have strong emotional quotions. And the stronger the emotion you feel from some event outside of you, the more altered you feel inside of you, the more your physiology changes, the moment of that change, you have to pay attention to the cause. And the brain freezes a frame and takes a snapshot or a series of snapshots, and that's called a long-term memory. So every time the person thinks about their past, They're producing the same chemistry in their brain and body as if the event is happening.

And the redundancy of that cycle is causing the brain and body to hardwire that memory and emotionally condition the body into the past. And that person's identity, that person's state of being is literally in the known, in the familiar, familiar known. I want to emphasize that most people are so caught in this, conditioning, like the prevalence of this is so far reaching as to skew what it means to actually exist in this world in a different state. Like so few people get out of that pattern. A good way to see that is that everybody does it. Like everybody does that all the time. And here's the

problem. All of that is fine. The problem is that they're looking through the lens of the past that reality. They're seeing their future through the lens of the past. They can't see possibility because they can't think greater than how they feel or feelings have become the means of thinking. And if you believe that your thoughts have anything to do with your destiny, then you're thinking in the past because those emotions are driving your thoughts and those emotions are the familiar records of the past, right? So now, so let me just go one step further. So that is how people reaffirmed themselves every single day into a known identity. And let's just say the trauma or the betrayal or the loss or the shock or the diagnosis

was a profound moment that created a strong emotion. And that person doesn't think that they have any control of regulating and changing that emotion because it's visceral, it's somatic, it's real, they feel it. And that disturbance, that known, they'd rather cling to that. pain. They'd rather cling to that suffering, then to take a chance and possibility to step outside the unknown. Now, the hardest part, I'm getting to time, by the way, the hardest part about all of this, then is not making the same choices you did the day before. So the moment you start to realize that you complain, that you blame, that you make excuses, that you feel sorry for yourself, that you

judge others, that you react emotionally to your spouse, to your ex, to your coworker, to traffic, the moment you become conscious that you're doing that and you say, I'm going to stop. Well, the body now, the servant is now the mind. The servant is now the master. So now the body's clinging to the known and you say, okay, I'm not going to complain. I'm not going to suffer anymore. You make a different choice. And the body says, well, wait a second. Jonathan, you've been doing that for 30 years. So you just, what? So the body starts. influencing the mind, it starts sending signals back to the brain and says, you can't do this, it's too hard, start tomorrow, it's your mother's fault, it's your culture's fault, it's this,

it's your past. And if you accept, believe, and surrender to that thought, as if it's true without really having a critical analysis of it, it slips right by your conscious mind, and it causes you to make the same choice that leads to the same behavior that will reproduce the same experience, and there you are on the couch feeling the same emotion and you say this feels right well no that feels familiar right so that's that's how people live in the known they live in the past so the predictable future then is everybody gets up in routine and they're on autopilot and they run through a series of automatic behaviors and if you do that enough time a habit is a redundant set of automatic unconscious thoughts behaviors and emotions that's acquired through repetition do it enough times the body will now know how to do it better than the conscious mind it becomes implicit it, right? So now, most people lose their free will to a set of programs and their bodies dragging them into a predictable future based on what they did in the past, and that predictable future is the known as well. So if the familiar past is the known and the predictable future is the known, there's only one place left where the unknown exists, and that's really the sweet spot of the generous

present moment. And when we truly can become relaxed, and dial down the stress hormones that cause us to live in survival, that causes us to try to anticipate the worst case scenario that remembers the past. If we can work with the body and be greater than the body, to be greater than our attention on every element in our environment, and truly labor for the present moment, that unknown, which has been conditioned into the human being to be a scary place because in survival, you run from the unknown. If you can teach people to actually relax into the present moment and relax into that place, that's the unknown. That's where possibility exists. And we all do it. And getting to that elegant moment then, time tends to

alter. You think only 10 minutes went by, but an hour and a half went by. And where were you? Well, as your brain waves slow down in this process, when you're in like a thinking analytical place, like we are right now, we're in these brainwave patterns, you understand it's beta brainwave patterns. But as you slow your body down and it starts moving to alpha, time alpha waves tend to cause time to seem a little bit more elongated. When you're in theta, which is when you're half awake and you're half asleep and you're relaxed and awake, in that level of theta, time, one moment seems to be. really long. So you have an extension of time. And it turns out that you can teach people how to do this. And when you do, their autonomic nervous system begins to regulate back into order and stress is autonomic dysregulation. And all of a sudden, a person has a sense of energy, a sense of euphoria, a sense of freedom, a sense of clarity. The brains, we've measured this, the brain

start firing in more order and more coherence that it oscillates and synchronizes different compartments of the brain or communities of neurons are working together and you start feeling more whole more like yourself in the in the understanding of yoga as an example if you're truly really into the act you forget about all your problems you forget about all the things you got to do you forget about what happened yesterday breathing is a way to really change your brainwaves as we've studied this thousands of times. You slow your breathing down, you slow your brainwaves down. You slow your brainwaves down. You stop analyzing and thinking. When you overanalyze and overthink, when you're in high, high beta? And when's that? When you're threatened, when you feel danger, when the stress hormones are

running. And we've studied the brain when this happens. And when you're analyzing your life within that disturbing emotion, I can guarantee you you're going to make your brain worse. In fact, your thought of the problem is actually producing the very chemistry to arouse you, further out of balance. So teaching people how to find that generous present moment and actually relax in the unknown and dissociate from their body, dissociate from their environment, and dissociate from time, the predictable future in the familiar past, causes them for some reason to get a reboot in their nervous system. And they think, oh, God, it must have been 10 minutes. and oh my God, it was an hour and a half.

That, to me, is taking all of your attention or disinvesting all of your attention out of this three-dimensional reality. And that's when the door to creation or the mystical moment really begins to happen for people. All right, everybody needs to take a deep breath because that was intense. I agree, because there's so much in what was just covered

in the last two minutes that is fundamental to our experience as human beings. that I think people at this point in the conversation, you know, the collective conversation, a lot of people have heard pieces of this. But I don't think they understand what that really means for their everyday experience. This is an arena that makes a lot of people uncomfortable, you know, it does. It makes a lot of traditional Western types uncomfortable. It can make a lot of, you know,

You know, people who are trained, especially in the kind of traditional academic, you know, system, it can make people nervous. And historically, it has. You know, the web that has no weaver, you know, was kind of a very big opening for this kind of consciousness and Western thought. And, you know, I just want to say that while Dr. Joe and I may not agree, you know, on a lot of things or a lot of nomenclature or a lot of methodology, everything that we just heard, we know to be true. We've known it both. both if you believe in Eastern philosophy and medicine, which for thousands of years has had a completely different and beautiful lens with which to look at health and consciousness. And also we know it from the way that we study human memory and experience. So the, I mean, I know this, Dr. Joe, I hope you don't feel uncomfortable with me saying this. Like, what you said about memory is absolutely true. And what happens is I might use different terminology, you know, the neuronal potentiation, the neuronal firing that occurs with an experience that is particularly salient. And that could be, obviously trauma is sort of the one that we know the most about,

you know, in the scientific community, just, you know, for a very sad reason, it is easy to study. But also experiences that we have that are exceptionally ecstatic, exceptionally beautiful. I mean, it's also the foundation for why people form codependent relationships because really intense chemical firing around certain emotions and sensations, it creates these pathways. And, you know, I would argue that many of the most, you know, kind of fundamental pathways, which, you know, modern psychotherapy would then describe as your organizing principles are the laying down of these tracks, you know? And, you know, it happens in the CA1 and CA3 regions of the hippocampus. and the pictures are beautiful and it does.

It looks like a, you know, what's it called, a seahorse? Is that a thing? A seahorse. It looks like a seahorse. And, you know, the decades and decades of research that has been done just on this one little section of one teeny little structure of a subsection of the human brain and other brains as well. You know, it literally, we know what memory looks like. but this is one of those things that is typically saved for grad school. It's typically saved for that kind of like ivory tower, Western academic, you know,

like we had to dissect the hippocampus in neuroanatomy. Like that's the level of understanding that we were expected, you know, as graduate students in neuroanatomy to do, right? But when most people hear Dr. Joe say it, what he's doing is he's putting that into terms that people are supposed to understand so that they can actually do things to change their lives. And the fact, and I'm not a,

I am not a particular proponent of Dr. Joe in particular. Like, I'm a student of life. But I just want to like say for anybody who's skeptical, like nothing that Dr. Joe has said is against our, you know, understanding of how memory and emotion and our human experience works. Well, let's, let's make it,

Let's make it practical for everybody then. Okay, let's make it really practical because everybody secretly wants to evolve and have a new experience. Whether it's wealth, whether it's health, whether it's a new relationship, whether it's a new career. Everybody has in their mind some vision of where they want to be in the future. There's nothing wrong with that. Our simple model is that your personality creates your personal reality. That's it. And your personality is made of how you think.

how you act and how you feel. So the present personality who's listening to this podcast has created the present personal reality called the life, which means then if you want to change your life, you want to create a new personal reality, you're going to have to change your personality. You're going to have to change because nothing changes in your life until you change. So what is the understanding of change? So we've spent over 10 years studying a way to explain what change. change is because if you think 60 to 70,000 thoughts or however many thoughts in one day and 90%

of those thoughts are the same thoughts as the day before, you're in trouble because the same thoughts will lead to the same choices. The same choices will lead to the same behaviors. The same behaviors create the same experiences. And the same experiences produce those very same emotions and those same emotions influence our same thoughts and our biology, our neurocircuitary, or neurochemistry, our hormones, or gene expression, our immune, everything stays the same because we're the same. So it has traditionally taken crisis or trauma or loss for someone to make up their mind to change. So the moment we decide to change, okay, I want to create a new personal reality, a new life, I got to change my personality. Well, this concept called metacognition,

a forebrain function, you know, the seat of our conscience, our frontal lobe, allows us to to think about what we're thinking about, to notice how we're behaving, and to become aware of how we're feeling. And the repetition of thinking, acting, and feeling in the same way causes our brain to become hardwired into very specific neural patterns, right? So that firing and wiring over time

causes us to happen so automatically that we're unconscious of our conscious self. So the moment we become conscious of those thoughts, the moment we become aware of those behaviors, the moment we notice those feelings, we're no longer the program. In fact, we're the consciousness observing the program, and that's the first step to change. So when you decide and become so conscious, the word meditation, I looked it up, the symbol means to become familiar with. That's all it means. It means familiarization.

So if you become so familiar with, I can, it's too hard, I'll never change. No one loves me. You become aware that you are blaming, complaining you all day long and talking trash about somebody. You notice all of a sudden that this feeling that you're feeling every single day that you're so accustomed to is really guilt or shame or unworthiness. In other words, when you're inside the jar, you can't read the label, right? So you've got to become conscious of that unconscious. You've got to see yourself through the eyes of someone else. The tragedy that causes you to no longer feel like you any longer actually cause.

actually causes you to look at you from the eyes of someone else. You can see yourself more clearly because you're not feeling like you any longer. That's the big moment of change. So then when a person really can become so conscious of their unconscious self that they don't go unconscious again, or let me say it another way, how many times do we have to forget until we stop forgetting and start remembering? That's the moment of change, right? So we default back to our old personality every single day because we respond to someone or something in our outer environment. And I say, my, and why are you unhappy today?

And you say, well, I am happy. I'm unhappy today because of that person or that circumstance. It's never one thing, Dr. Joe. It's always like 10 things. Yeah, it's just 10 things, right? But you would say, I'm in this way because of these 10 things. But what that really means from biological standpoint is that something in your outer environment is actually controlling the way. way you're feeling and the way you're thinking. Now, anything that's controlling your feel, controlling

the way you feel and think, you're victim to that circumstance. And the stronger the emotion you feel for that condition or that problem or that person, the more you pay attention to them. And where you place your attention is where you place your energy. And you're giving your power away to that person or circumstance. And that could also be, I mean, that is true. And I think we all know this, of, you know, like a diagnosis. And that meaning that, I mean, the 12-step terminology is like you can make anything your higher power, right? You can make a diagnosis, a judgment of you, the way your parents, you know, taught you to think about yourself. Those things can be essentially what you worship.

And that then is this, you know, kind of self-perpetuating, I mean, literally self-perpetuating. loop. Exactly. Everybody has done this at some point in their life, right? Where they have to catch the thought. They have to catch how they speak, the act. They have to notice, oh, this is that weird feeling again. I'm not going to just stay in this feeling. Can I change it? Right. So then if you remind yourself every single day of who you no longer want to be before you start your day, become conscious of your unconscious self, so conscious that you don't unconscious. Don't go unconscious in your waking day. The next fundamental question is,

if your personality creates your personal reality, what thoughts do I want to fire and wire in my brain? And with attention, with presence, and intention, energy, begin to fire and wire that thought. If you can fire and wire that thought, you start installing the neurological hardware in your brain. Keep doing it, and start acting like a software program becomes more automatic.

That's the new voice in your head that says you can. It's possible. or whatever. And then how are you going to behave in the Zoom meeting? How are you going to behave with your children? How are you going to behave with your ex? How are you going to be today when you open your eyes? Now, here's the cool part, and you know this. The act of closing your eyes and mentally rehearsing who you're going to be planning your actions in the day, mental rehearsal shows that you could actually install the neurological hardware in your brain to look like you already did it or it already happened. Now the brain's no longer a record of the past. It now becomes a map

to the future. Okay, we've all rehearsed something in our life and our minds over and over again. Keep doing it. Keep rehearsing it. Keep reviewing it. And it starts to become more automatic. And you could actually program a person then to behave as a happy person. No magic there. You installed the circuits. Now here's the hardest. part. Can you teach your body emotionally what that future would feel like before it happens? In other words, don't wait for your healing to feel gratitude. Don't wait for your new relationship to feel love. Don't wait for the mystical moment to feel awe. That's kind of the old model of reality of cause and effect. Let's wait for something out there to happen to take away this emptiness,

this guilt, this lack, this suffering, whatever. What if I could condition my body emotionally into the future. So then we started studying not only brain coherence, but we started studying heart coherence. Could a person trade resentment and watch their heartbeat in a really irregular fashion to a more coherent fashion where when they're feeling gratitude, when they're feeling inspiration, when they're feeling love? Could they practice that enough times so much so that they can condition their body into the emotion of the future? Now here's the cool part about that. our research shows you could absolutely do that and do it so well that you feel like the future that you're in wanting to experience has already happened and when it feels like it's already happened you feel less

separate from it which means you're no longer looking for it why would you look for it if you feel like it's already happened now to become familiar with the old self and then fire and wire and condition the body emotionally and chemically and become familiar with the new self if you're truly in the experiment of life and I truly change my personality, there should be some evidence in my world that there's been some change, either in my body, in my life, and in some way. And literally, their biology changes, their immune system changes. We've isolated thousands of metabolites that there's a flourishing going on in the body. The body's responding. It's believing emotionally that it's living in a different environment. That's the key.

What you're describing is something that I, you know, know the language of, mostly from like cognitive behavioral therapy, you know, when you think about that sort of sense of reprogramming, you know, and especially as someone who, you know, has had periods of my life where I've been on medication, not been on medication, I am on medication now. You know, I've gone back and forth many times and with, you know, a variety of different reasons and experiences. for some people, that medication can be the bridge to get through a particular, you know, neurotransmitter stew that you're in so that you can then access these things easier, better, more efficiently, or without kind of the risk of, you know, for some people, suicide and self-harm, right? So I guess my question would be, you know, what is your sort of like perspective on other, either supplemental, you know, ways to do this. Because I know a lot of people that do, you know, follow you and, you know, practice, you know,

what you teach. In many cases, they really believe this is the only way that they want to do it, which is totally fine. But I'm curious sort of what your take on that is. Well, look, I'll explain it in two ways. We have three types of stress, physical, chemical, and emotional. Physical stress, trauma, accidents, injuries, falls, you know, emotional stress. emotional stress is traffic jams, internet connections, second mortgages, single parenting,

you know, family tragedies. Chemical stress is, you know, bacteria, viruses, blood sugar levels, hangovers, you know, loss of sleep, whatever. In stress, it's when the brain and body are knocked out of balance out of homeostasis. The stress response is what the body does naturally to return itself back to order. So the theory that I understood is that 75 to 90% of very person, that walks into a healthcare facility in the Western world, walks in because of psychological and emotional stress.

You break your leg. It's a physical stress. You got to take these drugs to take away the pain and that's enough. You're chemically out of balance. And you can't work. You can't do your thing. You know, you're emotionally out of balance. And it turns out that your healing will be compromised

because you're out of balance. And the autonomic nervous system can't really reboot back to order. This is something that medicine has not acknowledged for, basically all of its history, meaning the way that, I mean, I remember, you know, when I've heard stories like, you know, when my grandmother had, she had a mastectomy, it was a radical mastectomy, this was in the 50s. And like, no one ever talked to her about it. No, like, it was just like, we do this, you go home, everything's fine. And that's the way, you know, I was born in 75. That's still a lot of the way that many of us were programmed. Like, I'll tell you when you're

hungry. I'll tell you when you're happy. I'll tell you when you're sick. Take this pill. Go to sleep, right? This is a very new kind of way to think about things. things, and it is true. I believe that if you can get two out of those three in order, if there's physical stress, emotional stress, and chemical stress, then there's got to be physical balance, chemical balance, and emotional balance. So let's just say you take all your vitamins, you take your drugs, you do your Pilates, you do your core power, you know, you get massage, acupuncture, chiropractic, you run, you do all the things. But you're still in a toxic environment where you're responding and reacting to the same conditions emotionally. Well, your body is going to stay in the

past because the emotion is keeping you connected to the past. So what happens then? This happens numerous times and the people that do come to our work. The chemo didn't work. The surgery didn't work. The radiation didn't work. The vegan diet didn't work. The ketogenic diet didn't work. The yoga didn't work. Nothing was working. And so then this is a point where the person says, Nothing outside of me is changing what's inside of me. And we just had a cancer researcher on the stage. It had stage four, a stage four sarcoma in her uterus that metastasized everywhere. There's no evidence of her disease and her body any longer.

Now, do I appreciate medicine? Do I appreciate pharmacology? Yes, I do. And I think for acute health conditions, that medicine has a really great handle on acute and crisis situations, when it comes to chronic health conditions, chronic health conditions require a lifestyle change. Period. You got to make different choices if you truly want to do it. So 100 years ago, 75 years ago, you get diagnosed with a health condition. You went to the doctor and she said, or he said, you need this organ taken out.

taken out. You need this type of treatment. And I'm the authority. You have no access to the information that I have. So just do what I tell you. Everybody signed and informed consent. And if my gallbladder's not going to take that out. If my uterus isn't good, take that out to take out whatever you want. So then fast forward to today. You get a diagnosis. What happens now? People go, oh, goodness, thanks for the diagnosis. Then they go home and they research everything about the health condition. Why? Because information is available now through technology. So they go back to their doctor and they say, gosh, you know, I want to try this other treatment. I want to try this alternative thing. And the doctor either says, I don't know anything about that or that's trash.

And the person now looks squarely at the doctor in the eye and says, time to find the new doctor. In other words, people do the best when they feel good about the health care that they're choosing. Right. So they're taking their power back now to be able to say, maybe. there is another way. So the pharmacology that we use when we're altered, either with anxiety or depression or psych with mood patterns or whatever it is, is an attempt to create chemical balance in the body. However, if you're still reacting to your ex in the same exact way, or you're still always predicting the worst thing that could happen to you in your future and embracing the emotion of that event, you're conditioning your body into anxiety and you'll have a panic attack.

Yes, the pharmacology will help to create more balance, but your response and reaction to the environment somehow causes you to become dependent on that exogenous substance. Now, I don't have a problem with that because everybody's at their own point in evolution. My mother just listened to anything the doctor said, even when I said to her, mom, your blood pressure is up because of stock market crash. She didn't want to hear that. She didn't think that she had to go to the doctor through all these tests and all this stuff. And of course, that's what it turned out to be. So there's a greater listening that's happening in the world now because of information. It's the four-minute mile.

That person that had the sarcoma that stood on the stage was a cancer researcher that told her story. That's the four-minute mile. I'm watching 1,500 people in the audience leaning in. They're witnessing truth right in front of them. Now they're conscious that there's another possibility that they were unconscious of. And she doesn't look vegan and she doesn't look slim and she doesn't look young and buffed and like a movie star. She just looks like a person, a normal person. And invariably, somebody in the audience, listening to truth.

She's speaking truth right now. Telling her story about how hard it was to overcome herself, how hard it was to overcome her body when she was in pain and she didn't feel like doing the work. She did it anyway. To overcome her doubt, to overcome her fear, to overcome all of the, those things and believe in a future that she can't see her experience with her senses yet, but truly understands the science of how that takes place. Once you understand the what and the why, the how becomes easier. So we use science as the contemporary language to demystify the process of personal change

and transformation. It is the language that we use that doesn't exclude anybody. We don't talk tradition. We don't talk religion. We don't talk culture. We don't talk spirituality because that's going to divide the audience. So we create the scientific model. That's the first point.

Learn it. Be present with it. But the next step is you've got to be able to teach it back. So in our audiences, when we explain things and we're combining quantum physics with neuroscience and all neuroendocrinology and all that stuff, once the person, I finished the concept, you're going to have to turn to Jonathan and say, okay, let me just explain this. Because I've got to fire and wire this in my brain. I got to understand what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.

And nothing left to conjecture, nothing left to superstition, nothing left the dogma. You understand exactly what you're doing and why. And when you understand the meaning behind it, your prefrontal cortex turns on. And when it does, the powerhouse turns on. And you can get an ice bath and know nothing about the benefits of an ice bath, get an ice bath. And you could really have a really bad response. You can get some knowledge about what to do when you're in the ice bath and the value of it. And once you understand that and you get in the ice bath, you will actually have positive effects on your immune system where when you didn't know what you were doing and assigned meaning to it, you had a negative effect.

So the person then who has the intention and the understanding, and we set up the conditions in the environment, and we give them numerous opportunities to get beyond themselves, numerous opportunities to practice and evolve their experience. Our research shows that if you do that for seven days, the number of metabolic changes, metabolites from the cell, thousands of metabolites that are being released in the brain and body, suggests that the person is literally their body. body's believing they're living in a different environment. Now, here's the weird part. They're in a ballroom. There's nothing really amazing happening in a ballroom. I've been to thousands of ballrooms. They all look the same. And yet the body's looking like it's in a very enriched environment. It's looking like it's in a different place. So when you have evidence and testimony and you have evidence in scientific measurements, I think evidence all of a sudden becomes the loudest voice and it only takes one person or two people to break that four minute mile and then all of a sudden

just like an infection spreads amongst the community and creates disease all of a sudden you see health and wellness become as infectious as disease there's a dramatic transformation in biology so now that that's possible now that people are aware of that possibility now it's in their consciousness and consciousness is awareness and information allows us to become aware of what we were unaware of. And that's what life is about to evolve our experiences. And some of those people are dependent on pharmaceuticals and dependent. And I never say, stop taking anything. I always say, keep going to your doctor, keep getting the scans, keep getting the tests. You need feedback to let you know what you're doing is correct and then make another choice if it isn't. But a lot of people,

actually cross that river and wind up on the other side. And those are the people that we're studying because their blood is rich with a lot of information that suggests that there's a very different experience going on inwardly. Dr. Joe Dispenza, it's been really, really so fascinating talking to you. Thank you so much for being with us. And really, really nice to speak to you. Thank you. You're welcome. You're welcome. All right, you guys. Bye. That was Dr. Joe Dispenza. I feel like there was a lot that we didn't get to slow down enough and unpack. And there's so much that he wants to cover. And I felt like we were getting the super fast version of this.

But, you know, Mind B. Alex's breakdown to like unpack things and really explore each one of those pieces. Like the notion that we are constantly scanning for the worst possible thing that might happen, which is, you know, very common for a lot of people because the must. mind is anticipatory in many ways and how that is programming our biology, the chemicals in our bodies and the relationship between how the body is speaking to the mind and then vice versa, the mind speaking to the body and creating our feelings. Like, we can do 40 minutes on that. I'm not saying I wanted a shortcut, but it's true. Like, I wanted to like, I wanted to ask everything because, you know, as we kind of broke down in the episode, there is all.

a lot of what he said that's like completely consistent with not only, you know, kind of like our Western understanding of memory and thought and emotion, but also, you know, thousands of years of Eastern, you know, Eastern medicine and Eastern philosophy and practice. But the kind of jump, you know, that he makes, I really wanted to take more time with. Where do you see the jump? One of the things that I kind of felt like nervous about, I guess is, you know, I'm a person who I have a story of struggle, you know, of like trying to find the right thing. Like, what's the thing? What's the thing that's going to, you know, not make me feel sad or help my anxiety be better or help me, like, whatever. And I've been on a journey. And to me, like,

I just feel committed and I'm like really in acceptance that like this is my journey. You know, figuring myself out is my journey. And I guess part of me is nervous, like, to talk to someone like that because I feel like, and sometimes I feel like this with you, because you do, you have a lot of, like, experience and, you know, education about things that I don't know about. Like, part of me was like, is he going to be like, well, my, I can fix all of your problems. You just need to do this. And I think there's a fear that, like, what if I were to, like, abandon everything? Like, get off the medication. Stop seeing my therapist and be like, I'm going to just do this. And there's two fears. Like, what if it didn't work? Would it mean I'm

doing it right? Would it mean I don't want it enough? Would it mean I am so damaged that I'm beyond even this kind of help, right? And then the other fear is like, what if it did work? And like, that's where it gets so trippy in your head, right? Like, whatever you want to say about Dr. Joe, like you don't have to like him, you can like him, whatever. But what if this is what we were wired for as humans? And not like all the buildings and skyscrapers and phones and things, But let me just say it and then you can respond. Like there's that fear, like in the back of my head that's like, what if all that stuff that Jonathan and his sister say is right?

So my response, I feel like gets caught in my throat because I don't want you to react to it. I turn around and I don't react. Here, go ahead. No, I don't want to sound pretentious and I don't want to sound like I have judgment about it. That's what pretentious judgmental people say. But when you started that and said, I have such a story of struggle and my process and I'm in acceptance, I was like, how much time could you spend or have you spent removing yourself from all of that narrative and just sit in an unknown of endless potential where there's no association with all of the past. and I use narrative for lack of a better word, but how much time do you spend just holding a space

for a mime that is totally different than the mime that exists now? What do you actually mean? I actually mean you take a meditative space. And I know, and I kind of know what the answer is because I know what your lifestyle is. You're very, very busy. I know that you've built a little meditation corner and you try to do meditation.

And, you know, you say you mean. I don't try. I do it. Okay, you do meditation. But I also know that meditation is used, the word meditation is used for a variety of different things that are not all the same. And most of the time it's used to quiet our minds or, you know, envision peace or whatever that is. What he's saying about the unknown is what if we can literally take ourselves as an image or as a feeling. and remove it from our current experience.

Through these kind of breathing techniques and things like that. Sure, but leave the breathing techniques for a second. And just in your imagination, to remove yourself from diagnosis, remove yourself from everything that has been a struggle for you. Right. Remove yourself from every reaction you believe to happen. Like, you know, you talked about that event that you're going to potentially be at and there's people that you think may react to you in a specific,

specific way. What if you could literally just hold space for 10 minutes at first and say that you, there's a you that exists that you don't know yet because it's never existed. But what you do know that it's detached from everything that you know about yourself currently and you get to build it from scratch. And how much time do people do that versus being attached to the version of themselves that is familiar. That is wired based on all the past experiences. That is the loop that we're stuck in. That is the anticipation of things going wrong.

Because when I heard you speak about that reaction that people would have, it was like totally based on how everything has happened in the past, which is the way our brains are wired. But there could be a version of us that is completely different. Just to hold the possibility of, you know, and I use quantum here very loosely, a quantum change. You're not allowed to use the word quantum. A massive change. A total transformation. A jump outside. We're used to the sort of incremental change of, oh, if I meditate a tiny little bit. But what I hear as a possibility is that

people can have a radical transformation. And the first step is detaching from all the expectations of how we believe things are going to be and hold the possibility of something else. and where I don't want to be judgmental, but I do think it's really interesting is that we have no idea what's possible until we begin to hold the space for this infinite possibility, and no one actually spends time holding that space

outside of the limits that they're currently holding. Now I'm fired. I go home. No, I don't, I think that's really eloquent. I think it's really beautiful, and I think it's presented very, very well. And, yeah, I think for the vast majority, of people, there is not time or space, but I would love to visualize a world where that was a priority, you know, for people. And, you know, the thing that makes me kind of nervous, and I don't

mean to, like, introduce this, but, like, a lot of this, I'm not saying that you sound like a messianic person, but a lot of the notion of a messianic era is this kind of awakening of consciousness, you know? And, you know, as a Jewish person, we have a very different kind of concept of the Messiah as opposed to the Christian concept, which was that Jesus was, you know, the Messiah. But the notion of a messianic era, you know, as kind of, you know, historically understood is that there will come a time when there will be a union among people of camaraderie and of cooperation. And that notion, I think, is very close, you know, to this concept of like, what if you know, this was our reality. And the fact is, you know, thousands of years ago, a lot of people did exist in this space, you know, and coming from a tradition that does have, you know, a tremendous

amount of mysticism, you know, as part of, you know, really the structure of a lot of our, of our religion, you know, I was, you know, raised and educated with this notion that we can access things, you know, outside of the realms of our understanding. And we can cultivate that. And once we lose that ability because of culture, you know, all the things, we can't hear the same way. You know, that notion of like, God didn't speak to people. And like I once heard someone say, what if God is still speaking to us and we just don't know how to listen anymore, right? And anyone who's had a profound experience in nature maybe has had a taste of that. You know, sometimes you see something so either magnificent and glorious or devastating, right? I mean,

sometimes when you see things, God forbid, like fire and you see what fire can do. It's like that is so humbling, right? And that it is. It's just a, it's a different expression, you know, of our world. We stop listening because we're just stuck in whatever loop we're in. And we think that loop is reality. And we think that there's no way out of that. And so that's why it requires, like, just taking a moment a little bit at the start. But, you know, he talks about people doing this for an hour a day where you're really, it's like I don't have whatever limits I have. Right. I'm just living outside of that for... And it would be like...

Enough time to just imagine it. Right. Like, it would be like pretend like... I mean, here, I'm going to just do a quick example. Sorry, my eyes are itchy, which is like an immune response to stress. What I imagine, which sounds like insane, would be like, could I get to a meditative place, I don't know, or whatever? We're like, I'm not thinking of myself the way I've been trained to think about myself, right? Like, is there a version of Mayam that's, like, so beautiful? And, like, her body is perfect.

And, like, we love her just the way she is. And, like, she's not annoying. She's not arrogant. She's, like, just this awesome person that everybody wants to talk to. Like, like that? She's not reactive. She's not reactive. She doesn't have any diagnoses.

She's fine. She's perfect. Right. So how can we not have all those things when we're constantly in a thought cycle that we are those things and we're reinforcing them. Right. And then we reinforce them mentally and then physically we feel anxious because we're annoying, we're reactive, we have a diagnosis.

And then we feel anxious because, oh my gosh, I think of these things about myself. Jonathan, why are my eyes itching? Because we're saying true things that you're having a reaction to and your body is physically programmed to have a reality that it understands. And as you begin to push yourself outside of that reality, you have somatic responses. Like, okay, you've asked me, you asked me on the Corey Taylor episode, oh, you're really going at it right now. You're having a total somatic freak out. Yeah. Okay, go ahead. Because you don't want to see that we have a major role in what we're experiencing. And you asked me in the Corey Taylor episode how I knew about clearing the apartment

complex. And I was like evasive about it because I feel shy. And I think that people, honestly, I think people like you with very scientific backgrounds who have a very strong command of language and who are very analytical are going to sort of rip down my experience. But I've spent 20,000 hours monitoring and witnessing people have somatic reactions to emotional responses. and doing hands-on work where they guide that through. And when we bring up levels of limited thinking to see the reaction that people physically have as their autonomic nervous system goes into a repair function

is profound. And there is a connection. There is a connection between the thought, feedback loop that we have and the physical reactions we have and that we limit our body's ability to repair and get back into some form of home. homeostasis because we're constantly thinking about the limits or the diagnosis or the anticipatory reaction that we're going to get from some major problem. And I'm not immune to it

at all. No, you're certainly not, but that's for another episode. And everything you've said, you know, is true. You know, the word that I said I don't like to use. Everything you have said, like, you haven't said anything that is not, that we don't know, honestly, you know, is true in our existence. I think the freak out is that your body's like, what if we do step out of this, like, part that we're contributing to our limit? Because I think we all want to move outside of whatever limits that we're struggling with. I'm just, you know what I think it is? I think I'm hitting my limit. I mean, totally serious. So what's happening for those of you who are not watching is I've had a, like, nothing's going on in this room. Like we've been sitting here for hours. There's no new smells.

Like, Scott, you don't wear cologne, do you? No. He's been in the room for hours anyway. He's been in the room for hours. I have not used any new detergent or any new hair product. The kind of scientific explanation for what's happening, the basic scientific explanation is that when certain chemicals reach a certain level, many of which can be related to stress or immunity,

our body will start reacting with a heightened immune response. So I'm a person also who's hyperallergic in general. like my allergic system operates the way my emotional system does. Like I don't just get a mosquito bite. Like I get an elaborate allergic reaction that looks like it needs medical attention. And it will persist for days and days and it will get infected and like all these things. Like I'm that person. So what we know is that an elevated stressor in anyone's life, it raises your baseline.

So if you've ever wondered why you're, for example, irritable when you're in pain, part of it is that all of your system is up, you know, is already up to your nose. So if any little thing happens, it's going to spill out the top of your head. Explain why this conversation would have your immune system react like that. So this is where, you know, it gets a little dangerous because you may think, you know, that you know, but there is not an absolute truth to what in this case activated this allergic. reaction. What do you think? Well, I'm going to think the thing that's less impactful, which is that we've been talking about really intense things. I had really high expectations of this interview. Like, we ended up not getting to talk to him as long as I wanted, so I felt like a little bit

anxious about that. Sorry, I cut you off, but your very physical eye-itching, almost uncontrollable eye-itching happened only after you talked about all the ways that you have a narrative of about who you are, and I began to talk about how much time do you spend outside of that narrative? And if we track just the timing of the conversation, that's what you physically reacted to. It could be. Why do you think that specific topic, which, you know, I have my theory, which is that it's pushing you outside of a comfort zone of what you're used to. It brings up a tremendous amount, you know, of, I mean, yeah, of activation, you know, of a system that is used to resisting. However, thinking as a scientist, what's to say that, this is going to be our promo, what's to say that the sound of your voice and the image of your face for all the years I've known you didn't all of a sudden cumulatively cause such inner disgust and repulsion that my body started elevating adrenaline and epinephrine?

And just like everything was just like, nah, get out. Could also be it. And this is why I don't tell you things. You know, if you came to me and you were like, this is what he says, you know, what scientifically could be happening. You know, I don't know that I can explain. I mean, I cannot and do not claim that I should be able to, you know, describe how blind people can see. I mean, sure, I can come up with many, many ways to describe potential mechanisms. things. I mean, that's actually not outside of the realm of my thinking as a scientist. But

what he is talking about with this like creating a new you, what he's talking about is a radical rejection of a paradigm. I'll just add one thing. His line, he said, you can't think greater than you feel. So that's this idea of getting out of that dynamic and trying to create something new. Well, and I think that let's just take an example, you know, before we wrap up here. I don't know how many of you, you know, listening or watching, you know, know someone with untreatable depression. And by untreatable, I mean, these are typically cases of people who have been hospitalized. Often they have attempted suicide or other forms of self-harm. Many, you know, have psychotic features. It can be that many medications have been tried, many combinations. And, you know,

it's known as kind of like treatment resistant depression. It can come in bipolar disorder, but sometimes it exists just kind of like on its own. And, you know, Dr. Joe does, you know, take patients like that and people with those kind of experiences and what he purports and, you know, kind of scientifically what he's proposing is, you know, entering a realm of mindfulness through a very rigorous, you know, program of breathwork and meditation and philosophy that leaves you open to a way of thinking that you've never had access to. Now, would I argue that some people have a chemical milieu that will not allow the belief in that?

Yes. Would Dr. Joe perhaps say, you don't want it bad enough? I don't know. But I would hate for people to get that message. And I'm not saying that's what he says. But the notion is, as he talks about, if you want to change, you have to change, right?

So this process and this methodology of meditation and mindfulness, and I will say philosophy, and as you said, an understanding of kind of why you're doing what you're doing, he believes can reset, which like resetting your nervous system is not an actual scientific thing. I would say it's a process. You know, it's not like flip a switch or have one meditative experience and you're like, I'm cured. But reset can be a process, the way you were talking about laying new tracks in therapy and CBT. The process of reconstructing maybe instead of resetting.

Right. And I think it's important also to remember that like the brain evolves very, very specifically, you know, in that first year. The brain evolves very, very specifically in that first five years, you know. And of course the brain is plastic and of course the brain changes. But it is very, very hard. And it can become harder the more deeply ingrained these beliefs, diagnoses, you know, all those things are. So as I understand it, he's trying to offer, you know, a way out. You know, do I believe that a group of people all meditating at the same time can raise like an electromagnetic field of energy?

It remains to be seen. Meaning if I, you know, kind of can get on board with that, I would need to know more scientifically. And I think, you know, for my kind of brain, I, you know, it's very hard for me. I need to know, you know, more and be able to explain that practically. you know, studies that exist at these events are isolated studies that exist at these events. And yes, I do come from a very traditional, you know, academic model of double-blind studies and placebo studies and things like that. So I really, really, I'm very grateful that we got to speak to him. I know so many people have had their lives, you know, changed by him.

And while I do have my, you know, my reservations and so many more questions, I think it's important also for us to acknowledge that there are many ways to break down and there are many ways to build up, you know. And for many people, this has been a really helpful way. If you want to tell us about how you're envisioning your new self, you can do so at Bialik Breakdown on Instagram. If you haven't already subscribed, do so anywhere you get podcasts. And check out Myam's YouTube channel. Click the little bell notification to get my mom.

And thank you for joining us from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.